The rebirth of the Zombie phenomenon

Rating: 8/10 (23 April 2019)

A man awakens in a hospital after being in a coma for about a month. Getting out of bed, he walks out of his room to an empty corridor, an empty hospital, then onto the streets of an empty London. He soon comes across the only living inhabitants of the city; savage, wild and red-eyed people trying to bite him. He's picked up by some other survivors, and we learn that England has fallen to some kind of infection, carried through people who bite others or spit blood on them. With no power, no phones, and no sign of any help, the survivors band together and live to escape, any way they can.
28 Days Later took this once tired genre into new territory in a blistering, no-holds bar kind of way, showing us what it might be like were zombies to be real. However, you won't hear the word zombie uttered once in the film, as they are simply called "The Infected" here. The film's stark imagery, realistic undertones, well-drawn characters carried by brilliant performances, and a never-ending sense of foreboding and dread, created a formula of zombie's films which took this genre to a new place. Suddenly, the fall of the world to the rise of the undead became seemingly possible, and we met characters who weren't just two-dimensional idiots posing as zombie food waiting to be picked off, but rather real people, with genuine emotions and motivations, trying to make sense of life after most had died.
Highly recommended.